


sunbreak

by animediac



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Character Study, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, just two childhood friends stressing over romance in the summertime, the impending doom of the end of high school
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28003380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animediac/pseuds/animediac
Summary: Everything happens during summer. All the very best, and all the very worst.(or, xu minghao's 10 part guide on how to survive falling in love with your best friend.)
Relationships: Lee Chan | Dino/Xu Ming Hao | The8
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	sunbreak

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of notes before we head off:  
> \- this is THE most self indulgent thing i have ever written. it is just words on a page that i liked the look of. please enjoy.  
> \- the setting does not have any significant place or time - it has taken shape from years on the new zealand coast, and from experience in japanese high schools, and my vauge understanding of the korean school system. i don't think the setting is what matters anyway though.  
> \- there is significant mention of underage drinking in this, even though i am operating under the new zealand system of legal drinking at 18. please note they are all drinking responsibly.  
> \- the playlist for this fic can be found [here!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2vwM2ULjxYsbbfgd8nPYyc?si=dRcru5GHTVmPNbYu7EkVXA)  
> \- they'll never read this, but thank you to all my friends who singlehandedly carried me through five years of high school. i hope you'll let me repay the favour someday.

_SO THE GEOGRAPHY OF_

_EVERY JOURNEY IS PRINTED HERE, SO GROWTH PREPARES_

_IT’S OWN DEFEAT, VISIBLE LOGIC TO REMIND ME_

_EVERY DEATH OR ENDING IS A CONSUMMATION._

_Lauris Edmonds, ‘Body Language’_

Minghao is eighteen, stuck on a math problem, when he realises he has no fucking clue what he’s doing with his life.

It’s not the math problem itself that’s caused him to suddenly stare blankly at the woodgrain on his desk, but that’s definitely contributed to it. There’s only so much parametrics someone can handle before it becomes too much. Nor is it the frankly overwhelming amount of sea air blowing into his room right now, the window in front of his desk thrown wide open in an attempt for some relief from the summer heat.

No, the problem is the university acceptance letter to the left of him, and the blare of BoA from his phone on his right.

Well, BoA isn’t the actual problem, it’s more what she’s representing right now. The screen flashes like a prelude to an epileptic seizure, his lock screen intermittently displaying an artistic shot of the beach, before switching off again. He really ought to get that checked out by someone - dropping it in the ocean probably wasn’t a good idea - but it works for now.

 **chan [16:12]  
**hey can you send me your notes for l2 physics?

It’s innocuous, disgustingly normal, and Minghao abhors the feeling that climbs up his throat, the grin on his face at the message.

Another chime.

**chan [16:13]**

mr kim SUCKS and i’m going to faiil this exam

Minghao picks up the phone from beside him, unlocks it with a press of his thumb, and the messaging app opens up, spanning years and too many text message top ups.

Beneath the surface of Chan and Minghao’s friendship is a fierce, undying summer.

Minghao at four years old was shy, and bad at the new language surrounding him - Chan at four years old talked enough for the both of them, and that solidified the kinds of friendship that doesn’t die. Family beach trips, primary school, losing milk teeth on the back field, grinning at each other with gapped smiles. Between them is a shared history that scarcely deviates, two mirrors of the same story, fourteen years in this town where the pavements have salt baked into the asphalt and the sea is inescapable.

The years unfold like paper - nine, ten, eleven. When they enter intermediate, Minghao thinks something might be wrong with him. Everyone around him starts having crushes and relationships, and Minghao just. Doesn’t.

He’s still not sure why; he thinks he might be broken. It’s when he’s fourteen and lying on the floor of the kitchen with Chan, flour everywhere and clumpy with water, that he realises, _oh._

_I want this to last forever. I want more than this._

Minghao learned the word gay first in primary as a joke, and then in intermediate as a threat. He is not one to forget these things and they remain in his bloodstream even now. He would rather there be nothing rather than there be these feelings, and yet there is no way of getting rid of them now. It has only continued like this, again and again and again, a bottomless finality.

He doesn’t want to face it at first - why would he? Minghao has made a life out of fitting into the spaces around him, and this is like a new tab on a puzzle piece that makes it too hard to slot into those perfectly shaped spaces. It is far easier to hide it all away and pretend that it is not true.

In lit class last year they talked about Berkely, and perception; the same applies here. If no one is around to hear a tree fall, it has still fallen. If you hide a person in a forest, they are still a person. He can call this love for Chan friendship, but it is still love.

It is still the same narrative, no matter the different names. He cannot force the truth to become something less bitter.

The knowledge of this fact is easy now - he came to terms with it years ago, second year at the bottom of the swimming pool with Chan looking back at him through the chlorine-clear water. It is dealing with the fallout of the fact that is the hard part.

His attempts at a quick fix sit on the desk by his elbow; the purple stamp of Tsinghua’s international department leering at him from the offer of acceptance that arrived in the mail on Monday. Unfortunately, that’s posing a problem all of its own, some kind of childhood monster that’s escaped from under his bed to perch on his desk, laugh at him for his cowardice.

There is already a logical answer to this problem, involving his mother and two alternate, politely worded emails, but the first issue prevails. Chan’s text messages have gone silent for the time being, but they will return. He always does - less a persistent parasite like Soonyoung, and more of a constant. Minghao has never known life without Chan. He’s not sure what it’ll be like.

Through his window, the early evening brings the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, a few streets over, and he takes a moment to look at the dying sunlight spilling over his hands, the woodgrain of his desk their old neighbor gave them when he moved house. The focus brings him back to himself in a weird way; the freneticism of everything around him feels smaller, now that he can see what is around him.

Anyway, in Minghao’s opinion, there is no problem that cannot be solved by a step by step checklist and a disgusting amount of coffee. The coffee option is unavailable, thanks to the all-nighters he's been pulling for end of year assignments and his unwillingness to go further out of town to buy the good stuff, and that leaves him with only one course of action. So, just as any sane teenager does, he abandons his homework, all three pages of calculus, and shuffles his hand over his desk for a spare sheet of paper. He comes up with an abandoned page of a refill pad, the first two lines taken up by a barely begun essay in purple gel pen, and scribbles out the introduction to an analysis of Othello.

 **chan [16:20]  
** hao?????  
i know you’re reading these I can see your read receipts  
if you don’t message me back i’m gonna tell auntie about that time you got drunk and climbed the clock tower

Ink blooms under his hand when he presses too hard, the blue bleeding through the translucence. Downstairs, the smell of sesame oil rises from the stained pan that he knows is hissing in his mother's hand, green onions and lotus root ushering in the heat of summer.

 **me [16:26]  
** YOU climbed the clock tower too  
but yes you can have my notes you didn’t need to threaten me

In front of him, the paper rustles in the breeze filtering through the open window, a reminder of his abandoned existential crisis.

The list ends up slid into his laptop case when he’s finished, title scrawled in dying blue ink. _Xu Minghao’s 10 part guide on how to survive falling in love with your best friend_.

Under the rising evening din of cicadas, Minghao lets out a long, tired breath.

—

**_Step 1: always act natural_ **

Junhui is leaning on the back of Minghao’s chair as he desperately tries to finish the calculus homework he neglected in lieu of an existential crisis. Behind them, Mingyu and Seokmin are debating whether or not the French teacher position is cursed, loudly citing examples like they’ve been given a job on prime-time news, with Soonyoung chiming in every so often through a mouthful of potato chips.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you hand in stuff late,” Junhui is saying when Minghao finally snaps out of the world of parametric functions. To their left the windows are open to stave off the sticky heat that’s plagued the classrooms, and the air-conditioning is on full blast. The resulting effect is a humid puff of air each time Junhui breathes over his shoulder, and a pool of sweat at the back of Minghao’s school shirt. “You’re like, so organised! You always have it done the night before.”

Slipping away from Mingyu and Seokmin’s slowly devolving argument, Soonyoung mutters “yeah, you always have it so I can copy,” before turning to jam a chip into Hayoung’s mouth when she starts to ask him what he got for question 7.

Minghao politely does not grace this comment with an answer, turning back to face Junhui who’s waiting expectantly for an answer to the new biggest conspiracy theory that is Minghao’s barely finished calculus work.

“I had that lit essay due,” he mumbles, kicking at where his bag is slouched against the leg of his desk as if to gesture to it. “I just forgot about the math.”

Minghao tries not to think about the purple gel pen introduction he had scribbled out in lieu of listing a survival plan. Realises with dawning horror that his existential crisis should have waited for the weekend and not the day before a practice essay was due.

“Oh! Can I have a look at it? I’m not sure if I approached the question correctly.” When Minghao looks up, Junhui gives him a grin, half his personal brand of cheekiness, half knowing; some odd kind of insight he's always had. Minghao has no clue where it originated.

Minghao blanches, shoving his face down under the guise of scribbling maniacally on his paper; behind them, Soonyoung sprays chip crumbs over Mingyu when Seokmin exclaims, “It’s like the defence against the dark arts position, it’s cursed!” He watches with barely veiled amusement as Mingyu lunges over the chipped, wooden desks to get to Soonyoung, who shrieks and attempts to crawl under Hayoung’s desk. Above him, Junhui starts up on that breathy, high pitched laugh he’s had since they were kids and hasn’t managed to change.

Mingyu eventually manages to wrestle the chip bag out of Soonyoung’s grasp, leaning back on Seokmin’s desk to devour what’s left of it, and Soonyoung stands there empty handed before apparently accepting his defeat to sit cross legged on the ground between the desks. Hayoung kicks at him when he tries to grab at her shoe, and Soonyoung looks up to Minghao while rubbing at what will likely end up as a bruise later.

“Oh yea, Minghao - do you know if Chan is gonna be at the studio today? I wanna ask him about that choreography class he wants to run next year.”

“You say that as if I know his every move.”  
  
“You don’t?” Soonyoung sounds genuinely shocked at this, and Mingyu chimes in, with a “Fourteen years of knowing each other and no telepathic connection. Tragic.”

Minghao just rolls his eyes at that, pulls out his phone to shoot off a text as the teacher walks through the door, mercifully cutting off the conversation, and he leans around the side of his desk to grab his books.

When he hands his (thankfully finished in time) homework out to Minju to collect, his phone buzzes in his pocket, set to silent in class instead of having BoA belt out her top hits in the middle of a lesson.

 **me [14:53]  
**are you coming to conditioning today?

 **chan [14:55]  
** yep  
i’ll meet you by the back path? i’m in food tech so can wheedle my way out early

Minghao grins at that, before slipping his phone back away, as their teacher starts on a convoluted metaphor about limits.

—

Soonyoung pounces on Chan as soon as he spots him after classes, vying for the brown paper bag in Chan’s hand, and Minghao allows himself a bark of laughter as Chan tries valiantly to keep it out of grasp. Thursdays mean practical for the food tech classes, and Soonyoung is currently desperately battling Chan for the leftovers he knows are in the bag.

The end of class finds them by the steps leading around to the back of the school, students crowding the exit. The summer heat drives most of them straight home or to the beach, or to part-time jobs, or to fighting off their friends as they attempt to snatch food out of their grasp.

Chan eventually loses, by virtue of being the younger and shorter, no matter how hard he tries to stretch in conditioning classes. Minghao allows himself a bark of laughter at the sight, Chan defeated beside a gleeful Soonyoung, who already has berries melting on his fingers, the juice down his wrist.

While Soonyoung digs into the bag, Junhui being lured over by the smell of experimental baking, Minghao wanders over to Chan, leans up against the sun-baked concrete of the fence next to him. Chan looks up, grinning, seemingly having gotten over the loss of his leftovers, and Minghao says so.

“Oh, that bag’s just a distraction,” Chan divulges with a wink, pulling out another bag from the seemingly endless pockets in his school bag. Minghao has seen him pull out everything from a rotisserie chicken to an extendable staff, from that bag, so at this point a bakery bag isn’t that much of a shocker.

“Those are the ones with the cheap chocolate; I snuck the good stuff out of the cupboard along with the dried raspberries because no way in hell was I going to eat cranberries that have only ripened in the last 2 days.”

Minghao doesn’t eat cranberries. Chan knows this, having been the one to dare him to eat unripe ones as a kid, and then watch Minghao be sick for three days. The grin that he aims at Minghao now tells him that he hasn’t forgotten.

“Thanks,” Minghao says eventually, taking the bag and trying to avoid touching the translucent spots on the paper bag where the oil and butter have seeped through. Chan hoists his bag over his shoulder and straightens up from where he’s slouched against the fence, the concrete leaving pressure marks on the backs of his arms.  
  
“I did eat most of the batch already though, so there’s only one left,” Chan adds, laughing as he avoids the light smack Minghao aims on his shoulder. “You’d better say they’re good because I’m facing down the wrath of Ms Kang if I get caught,” he sings, leaping away as Minghao lunges for him again, and sprints to meet Soonyoung and Junhui who have started making their way down to the studio.

The path there is muscle memory, ingrained after a lifetime spent there. Soonyoung finally remembers what he wanted to ask Chan, and they walk ahead, throwing around ideas for Chan’s classes next year.

A hot wind blows through the gutter, blowing up the dust, and Minghao reaches forward to tug the zip on Chan’s backpack closed, lest his books and assorted random objects fall out. Chan gives a grin in thanks; they’ve long surpassed verbal gratitude. Minghao watches as he falls back into step with Soonyoung, the two of them firing choreography suggestions at each other.

The muffin is still in his hand, berries melting in the molten heat of the day. He chews and swallows. He takes another bite. Chan flashes white teeth at a joke Soonyoung makes and Minghao desperately tries to remember step one.

At some point, Junhui makes a side comment about that time in second year when Soonyoung fell off the stage, and promptly gets attacked. Chan runs to stand by Minghao, laughing, as Soonyoung chases Junhui across the road, brandishing his water bottle. Behind them, Soonyoung spits his water bottle at Junhui and the pavement is so hot that the dark spots fade away almost instantly, evaporating into the air. Beside him, Chan yells as he gets hit by the next round of spray, spinning around to retaliate.

Soonyoung’s empty bottle hits the ground with a dull clatter, lunging for Chan, his school shirt soaked, and even as the warm water hits Minghao’s face, he’s grinning.

The water spatters over the pavement. Junhui laughs, high and clear. Beside him: Chan, the sunbaked pavement, the steps leading up to the studio. _Chan._

—

**_Step 2: you’re just friends_ **

Saturday afternoon brings with it the start of the summer weather, the dry heat-wave clamping onto town.

Minghao had duck-dived under the first tiny wave he saw upon arriving at the shore, and hasn’t emerged since; perfectly happy to tread water with his shoulders underwater. The water still holds a chill from spring, and he’d usually be in a wetsuit, but the heat of the air is forgiving in response to the water.

Somewhere ahead of him, Soonyoung and Mingyu are throwing themselves bodily at the shore dump, and screaming in delight when they inevitably get pummelled into the sand by the full force of the wave. As much as Minghao laughs at them from out back, he understands - there’s a pleasure in being battered by the sea. It feels good to remember gummy legs and stinging eyes.

Minghao swims past the break, short strokes pulling him over the breaking waves to where the swell lifts him up intermittently, rolling lines of surf running towards the shore. Up on the sand, Chan, Junhui, and Seokmin have set up some horrifically convoluted game of tag? Go home stay home? Minghao's not sure but the secondhand joy he gets from watching a shirtless Chan tackle Junhui into the sand is priceless. Behind them, further up the dry sand and under an umbrella, Jihoon yells something to Junhui, who promptly spins in place, still sandy from being tackled, and makes a beeline for Jihoon.

He decides to escape from the water before Jihoon is deposited into it like an angry cat by Junhui, who, unfortunately for Jihoon, volunteers at the shelter down the road and is well versed in hanging onto writhing animals. Minghao does not have the same skill, considering that Wonwoo's cat is the spawn of Satan and shreds Minghao's ankles every-time he ends up at Wonwoo's for 'drink energy drinks and speed-run an essay' days.

Dunking his head under the water in hopes that wet hair will keep him cool in the suffocating dryness of the air, he opens his eyes for a moment, ignoring the stinging from the salt. They've done this since they were kids, goggles not needed after years of familiarising themselves with the feeling of saltwater in their eyes. The sunlight filters through the water, spilling onto the sand beneath him, and when he finally has to come up for air, the light follows him. In his lungs, his eyelashes, in Chan, calling out a “ _hyung!”_ from the shoreline when Minghao finally emerges from the water, hand raised in a loose wave, perpetual grin plastered on his face, like something unreal.

Minghao ducks under enough to catch a wave, his arms windmilling as the water rushes through his nostrils and the whitewater burbles around him. He has to time it so that he doesn't wipe out on the shoreline, thanks to the dumping waves, and catches himself just before the sand rubs him raw. Runs up through the break zone with gummy legs to where Chan immediately grabs his wrist, tugging Minghao out of the way of both a breaking wave and a writhing, shouting Jihoon slung over Junhui's shoulder.

He stumbles a little bit and Chan wraps an arm around Minghao's back and laughs, and his heart does the funny bumpy thing it's been doing since that day four years ago in Chan's bedroom with the TV drowning in the background and Chan lying upside down off his bed cackling over Minghao’s (admittedly unfunny) story about Ms Kim from next door.

Chan drags him through the hot sand, the two of them making a break for it over the burning grains, rather than digging their feet under the top layer and shuffling through the cooler sand underneath. Up where the sand begins to give way to a verge of dry grass, there's a pile of bags and lopsided beach umbrellas, Seungkwan's shade-sail set up but Seungkwan nowhere to be found.

"Seungkwan and Vernon went to go get drinks," Chan explains, sitting down in the shade and scrubbing vigorously at his face with a beach towel, grains of sand clinging to the dampness.

Minghao hums in understanding and flops back onto his towel, too drowsy to move, too summer-drunk to complain about the heat. He slings an arm over his face to shade his face from the sun, and watches out of the corner of his eyes as Chan leans over to pull a drink bottle out of his bag.

Chan's hair is still light brown, the old blonde dye from a dance performance fading back to black. Minghao loves it like this - the soft hue, catching the sunlight and keeping it there like some kind of mythic net. He wants to run his hands through it, get his fingers caught in the knots that the sea salt forms in the loose curls. He wants this forever, but he can’t have that, so he’ll settle for the hair petting or the play fighting or whatever Chan’s willing to give him. He’ll settle for the first playground he cried at. He’ll settle for anything like this.

The beach drives off the summer heat, sea breeze staving off the oppressive weight of hot air. Minghao sits in common silence with Chan sitting beside him, before he slides down on the sand to lie down next to Minghao, his water bottle a physical divide between them.

 _This is what you can settle for_ , Minghao thinks, and then, _at least I get this._

—

**_Step 3: don’t think about him more than you have to._ **

Mingyu collapses onto the table approximately forty-seven minutes in. All things considered, he made it pretty far, Minghao muses, before pulling the math notes he’s just shown Mingyu back towards himself.

They’re all scattered over the lounge at Seungkwan's place, the two person couch taking four and Seungkwan's school bag, and the rest of them on the floor and huddled around the (frankly massive) coffee table for homework purposes. It looks like half the convenience store has exploded over it, the pale wood covered with an assortment of snacks, drinks, and revision packs, the latter of which is Mingyu’s current concern. He’s still face down on the table by the time Minghao gets through the next two questions.

Jihoon coughs from the couch, and out of the corner of Minghao’s eye, Chan passes a bottle of ice tea to him. Behind him, out the glass sliding door that Seungcheol once broke attempting to reenact a rescue he’d done at the beach that day, the ocean glimmers dully in that way it does when the skies are clouded over. Seungkwan's family home sits right on the beach, and the ocean is a constant as it is throughout the rest of the town. It’s grey today, though, not the glittering blue that draws the whole town to the water as if a summoning. Cloudy days always seem to drag - a physical gloom, the pressure of the skies weighing on everyone on the ground. There is no blinding orange sunset to be seen today, only the headachy pressure of late spring.

“Fuck,” Minghao eventually hears Soonyoung whisper from across the table, staring blankly down at his chemistry notes. “I left my calculator at home. Quick, someone, what’s sixty five plus eight?” There is far too much desperation in his voice for a man working out basic addition. Minghao looks down at his hands, and picks at the chipping, dried acrylic paint on the back of them to avoid having to grace Soonyoung with an answer.

Thankfully Seokmin helpfully informs him that the answer is seventy three, and they lapse into silence again as Soonyoung huffs out a breath and goes back to covering his revision guide with unreadable chicken-scratch. Thursdays bring a peculiar kind of fatigue - it’s that milky kind of tired, in the early evening with light bones.

Everyone’s quiet, with exam season stagnant and yet terrifyingly frantic at the same time; all of them hurtling towards the same light at the end of their final exams. It’s a mix of them; those in third year, working towards the end of their high school career, and those who are just below it in second year, but still have things to dread at the end of it. Beside him, Junhui chews on the end of his pen, and the bite marks on the plastic have been a constant since the first day of this year. It might be scary for the second years, academic pressure a constant, but it’s worse for the ones in third - to Minghao, it’s almost like being thrown out of the window and expected to fly, adulthood afforded by the number of years that they have been alive.

Eighteen is a strange place to be; they all carry it as best as they can.

As such, Minghao throws himself back into his homework - this, at least, is familiar. Around the table, the rigidity of the beginning of their study session has relaxed, less structured and more comfortable as they melt into the familiar swing of it. Junhui has a foot in both Vernon and Jihoon's laps, and neither seem concerned - it’s too late in the year to care.

Minghao finally finishes his practice math questions and reaches for the cream filled taiyaki melting in its wrapper beside him, takes a bite with one hand as he reshuffles his notes with the other. The red bean paste spatters over his knuckles and he chases it with his tongue. Behind him on the couch, the rustling as Seungkwan unwraps starburst after starburst sets a background to the rare moment of stillness. Before him, across the table, something unreachable; across an ocean, something unattainable. Chan, real, solid; ripping Seungkwan’s abandoned sweet wrappers into chains with his bitten nails.

He’s been working on physics, pen heavy on Minghao’s old notes, because Chan underlines everything he reads and circles the things that he thinks are important and puts stars next to the things that he thinks Minghao should think are important. The pile of shredded paper grows beside him, convenience store ice-coffee pushed to the side and forgotten. From this side of the table, Minghao cannot see the freckles that he knows are scattered over Chan’s cheeks, the bridge of his nose. He knows if he looks closely there will be a spot where the freckles darken; beside the cheekbone, where Chan always rubs the sunblock off.

He has to duck back down into his pile of economics work to shake off the buzzing, and the peace in him has been disrupted so much that he flinches when Soonyoung says, “Fuck, if this is bad imagine what _university_ is going to be like.” There’s vague noises of agreement around the table; Junhui finally stops mauling his biro with his teeth; Jihoon snarls an annoyance. Mingyu groans “Don’t remind me, I'm trying to pretend it’s not happening.” Minghao takes a deep breath and tries to hold it. Tries to not be seen for a short moment.

But Minghao has never been good at not being seen by those who know him. In the lull back into silence, he looks across the table, an unfathomable ocean once again, and Chan is looking back at him.

In the space between them, Minghao desperately tries not to think about the acceptance letter to Tsinghua university on his desk, his aunt’s spare bedroom in Shanghai, the easiest way to run away from everything. As if Chan could read his thoughts and pull the truth out of Minghao thread by thread - as if he couldn’t do that already. Minghao would do anything if he asked and it terrifies him.

That’s why he does not mention the letter out loud and he does not mention the leaving and he pretends that he is not being a coward. It is an easy way to run; to distance himself geographically. University in another country was logical, to avoid outing this secret he has kept under his skin for what feels like millenia; a tale of Greek proportions.

Either way, he cannot stay here silent. When Chan grins at him after holding his gaze for too long, Minghao has to look away.

Later, when they’re tidying up, Chan reaches over the back of the couch to drape a wonky necklace of sweet wrappers over Minghao’s head. He looks up from where he’s picking up sprinkle crumbs from the carpet, and Chan gives him a lopsided grin, before turning back to help Mingyu stuff his maths binder back into his backpack.

It’s always been like this - words aren’t needed between them - but Minghao thumbs at the thin, waxy wrappers draped over his shoulders, and thinks that this is a noose of sorts.

  
—

**_Step 4: even if your first memory is of him, that doesn’t have to mean anything_ **

Minghao cannot remember a time in his life that has not been bracketed by the constant of the local dance studio, with its chipped wooden floor and permanently smeared mirrors.

The air in the studio is stuffy, even with the air conditioning on, and he watches Chan move through a routine through a fog of humid breath. As he sits on the floor of the studio, back pressed against the cool of the mirrors, he thinks that Chan might’ve been born for the stage in every life. He dances like he was made for it, performs like it’s breathing.

Dance is a performance art. It’s like cataloguing muscle memory, weaving it into something beautiful and painful and true at the same time.

When Minghao watches Chan dance, it is as if he’s spun his life into it. Like saying, here. Look at the hours I have spent here in winter. Look at the times I tried to fly off the roof in primary and you had to catch me. Look at how many oceans I have stepped out of.

Look at me.

Minghao cannot stop looking.

The floor squeaks beneath Chan’s feet, fills the room alongside the swell of synth from the speakers, and Minghao just watches, and watches, and watches, Chan spinning to a stop as the song dies down, slowing to silence in the spaces between them.

He ends up with a leg raised to the ceiling, one hand pointing directly at Minghao - the other, shaking from exertion, wraps around his ribs as if to protect something inside of them. Minghao has to stamp down the ever present desire to reach out for the hand in front of him, and sticks his hands in the creases behind his knees.

Chan’s voice is breathy when he finally speaks, still gasping for air after his routine; puffs out hot air as he turns to Minghao with a flushed face, summer and exertion battling to raise his temperature.

“You wanna do one more routine before we head out?”

Competitions and showcases for the year are over - the studio’s annual showcase is long over, but the five routines that Minghao had performed are still itching at the soles of his feet. They still return to the studio, even with the dance season over, a way to stave off the stress of exams by running through things they know in their bones, a reminder that they can remember complexities whether they be dance or physics.

Chan unlocks Minghao’s phone with the ease of someone who’s known the password for three years, scrolling to find the right music. This routine is older, Minghao realises when the bass starts pumping out of the speakers - something light and bouncy with too much reverb, the kind of thing Chan listens to on the regular. They’d learned it a few years back, now - first year high school for Minghao, when the studio was renovating the main practice room and all they had to work in was the small one down the end of the building, the floors pockmarked from the tap classes and the barre worn smooth over the years of ballet classes.

It's surprising, how well he remembers the movements - at least for the first minute or so, before he misses a turn and ends up tripping into the next move, starting to laugh as he watches Chan forget the second half of the routine and start freestyling with too much hand waving. It ends up falling apart - the smudgy mirrors and Chan’s bright purple drink bottle witness to it all as they forgo any memory of the original routine and end up spinning in circles around each other; years of training staving off the dizziness.

Chan catches Minghao’s hands towards the end of the song, spinning him like a ballroom dancing scene in a terrible romance movie, and Minghao is too full of energy and laughter to shake off the points of heat where Chan’s hands come in contact with his wrists, the slow slide of their hands when he finally lets go. The music has died now, but Chan keeps them spinning for a moment longer - the squeak of their shoes over the floorboards, their laboured breathing, and Minghao’s breathless laughter is the only noise around them.

Later, when they leave the studio, the silence disappears, replaced with the perpetual drone of cicada noise, but the buzzing feeling doesn’t.

The streets are dark at this time of night, the streetlamps paving a path towards the neon signage of the convenience store down the main street. Chan skips ahead of him, spins to walk backwards and grins with nothing to say, eyes bright under the dim lights. Minghao wonders what it is like to simply look at someone without being overwhelmed by some misplaced sense of guilt, but Chan’s glee wipes it away for just this moment - keeps the buzzing under Minghao’s skin loud and warm and comfortable.

Lately, the air’s been sticky enough to get your fingers stuck in it. The heatwave has settled into his collarbones, the clean sweep of Chan’s hair. Everywhere they go, the tar on the road sticks to the soles of their shoes, as if it doesn’t want them to leave.

When they enter the convenience store, the muggy air outside turns quickly into the sharp feeling of the air-conditioning cooling his sweat and blowing over the exposed skin at the back of his neck, his wrists. His footsteps are muffled by the rattling sound of the refrigerators and the television playing what looks like a reality show, and Chan laughs sharply when one of the men on the screen falls into a pool.

It’s far too late for any of the packaged meals to be worth eating; the digital clock on the wall reads 10:13pm in blinking green lights, and Minghao resigns himself to instant noodles, grabbing a styrofoam bowl. Beside him, Chan does the same; grabs the brand sitting to the left of Minghao, less spicy but with dehydrated ‘vegetables’. Minghao gave up arguing the actual nutritional value of the carrot chunks years ago, and just grabs it from Chan to go and pay, to fill the styrofoam bowls with boiling water.

On the way to the counter, he sinks his hands into the freezer to grab an ice-block. Minghao does not eat frozen foods.

When they emerge from the air conditioned corner store, the heat hits Minghao less like a train and more like when you bury your face in your pillow and all you can breathe is hot, suffocating air. Chan falls into step beside him, pulls his instant noodles out of Minghao’s grasp with practiced motions. This is not a new scene.

Minghao knows their blocking; he moves to sit on the curb, where the footpath meets the road, and in a deviation from the script, his foot catches on a rock. There’s a sharp intake of breath behind him, right before Minghao rights himself with a practiced laugh, a way to brush off the embarrassment. Chan’s breath stutters again, before losing its tension, and Minghao knows what he is saying by the air let out.

Minghao’s mother tongue is Mandarin, the tones and inflections buried deep, but here is the language that has been learned and kept by virtue of practice. The one that they speak together, darting hands and words, puffing breath and Chan’s bright laugh spilling over the pavement when the ice block stacked on top of Minghao’s instant noodles wobbles precariously. He has known it for less time than the language he speaks with his parents, and yet it is the one he counts his numbers in.

It’s grown, too - he learned the word for worry in this language was Chan’s concerned face at five years old when Minghao slipped backwards off the swings at the park. He learned the possessive too, that day - the panicked thrumming in his chest when Chan did the exact same thing five minutes later.

And love has always been present, in it all; the alphabet, perhaps, or maybe the phonetics.

Either way, when Chan laughs and sits down on the side of the footpath, Minghao understands it as “You’re a mess. Are you okay?”

When his feet join Chan’s in the gutter, bone dry from day-sun, it means “I know. I’m okay.”

—

**_Step 5: don’t let anyone else find out._ **

The first time Minghao met Joshua, he was singing an anime opening on the karaoke machine, horribly off-key. It’s weirdly reassuring to know that a year at polytech has not changed him, as he’s doing the same thing right now.

“Are you filming this?” Minghao barely hears himself ask Seungcheol over the bass. He gets a weird look, Seungcheol turning his screen around to show Minghao the Clash of Clans screen. The expression on Minghao’s face must be funny to him, because all Seungcheol does is laugh loudly and hand Minghao his half finished cider bottle, telling him to go find Chan.

The soft plastic of the bottle buckles in his grip when he takes it from Seungcheol, the liquid making hollow noises when it sloshes against the sides of the bottle. The bass pumping out of the karaoke machine, paired with Joshua’s shrill voice, makes the liquid ripple inside, and he stares at it for a moment before deciding he’s not drunk enough to be staring at cider droplets at nine thirty at night.

It’s a pre-exam tradition, for almost everyone who’s gone through high school in this town. Get so drunk you can’t stand, sing karaoke until your throat is sore, and then study regretfully through a raging hangover for the next two days. Everyone needs an excuse to let go; to be the messy teenagers that they are, to let go for a night before they have to be ‘responsible’ and ‘studious’. Furthermore, Jeonghan and Joshua are back from university and polytechnic study, respectively, and the two decided their first reconnection with everyone had to be with copious amounts of music and alcohol. They’re all crammed together tonight in the small bach that Seungcheol’s renting while he works for the surf club as a lifeguard year round, and the carpets are full of sand, crunching underfoot when Minghao walks out of the lounge.

Minghao is jealous of how easily Seungcheol can face this town to the point of staying past his expected departure. Because no one ever stays here. It’s a home until you’re 18 and need to see more, even if what’s outside is scarier than what’s here.

Minghao shakes himself out of it and heads for the kitchen, toeing around drink spills in the hallway where Soonyoung is already halfway to pass-out-drunk and arguing with Seungkwan about last year's birthday surprise.

“CLAMS,” Soonyoung reiterates, battling with the speakers for dominance of volume. “IN MY BED. IT TOOK A WEEK FOR MY MATTRESS TO DRY.”

“How else were we supposed to keep them alive?” asks Seungkwan, and the rest of his sentence is cut off by Soonyoung’s drunken scream of rage, the result of three vodka cruisers and one of the cheap, nasty shots that Jeonghan considers a coming of age ritual.

Soonyoung lives life like a New Year’s countdown. Minghao loves him for it, and laughs as Seungkwan tries to fight him off with a jandal, the foot strap broken. He presses past them to get into the kitchen, the bass muffled through the wall and a separate mini speaker on a chest of drawers pumping out eighties dad rock into the hallway.

Minju waves to him as she steps out of the kitchen, the rim of a plastic cup trapped between her teeth, beer trickling down the side of her chin and one of the second year girls following behind her with a blunt in hand. He waves a _no thank you_ to it when she holds it out to him, and the sweet smell of the smoke follows them as they make their way out to the backyard.

He steps away from the thick fog to enter the kitchen, shoes catching on the loose patch of carpet where it peels up from the bracket separating the carpet from the twenty-year-old lino. Stepping over the threshold, he sees Chan with Mingyu and Jeonghan, each with a beer in hand. Except, he realises, for Mingyu, who’s swigging out of a wine bottle that Minghao knows began as his and went missing somewhere around the eight o’clock mark. At least he knows where it is now.

And Chan is leaning up against the table with his hands in his pockets looking like he had teased the moon out of hiding and shoved it down his throat. When he sees Minghao, he shifts his weight to one leg and calls out to him. Every shade of desire creeps out of the loose collar of his shirt and stabs Minghao in the chest, and, smiling back, he wonders how many lives he would have to lose to fish the moon back out of Chan’s mouth.

Probably all of them. He can't imagine a smaller sacrifice being enough to buy even seconds of Chan’s heart.

“Oh, Minghao!” Jeonghan calls, slipping off the top of the kitchen bench from where he’s perched beside the plastic bowls of chips and crackers. “I haven’t seen you yet tonight, how’ve you been?” He drapes himself over Minghao, long arms over his shoulders and lands a soft whack to the top of his head. Minghao just relaxes into the contact, knows from experience there is no escaping Yoon Jeonghan with beer and shots inside of him.

“The fact that you’re not pushing me off is a sign that you’re not drunk enough yet,” Jeonghan laughs, and Minghao gives him an easier smile this time, as Jeonghan turns around to open the minifridge beside him. The glass bottles inside rattle along with the fan, and Minghao keeps his eyes down, leaning against the oven, the greasy handle digging into his lower back.

He downs the two shots offered to him by Jeonghan, one after the other, to avoid having to look Chan in the eye with all that bleeding light pooled in his collarbones, and allows himself to be tucked into Jeonghan’s side.

Mingyu offers him the wine bottle, and Minghao hangs onto it by the neck as Chan starts up on telling Jeonghan about the shit that he’s missed this year, despite Jeonghan still being in a group chat with them. He wants the thick glass to shatter under his hands. The blood would be better than this - being so close to the heat of Chan’s skin and unable to get near for fear of him finding out.

Jeonghan stares at him from where he’s leaned back against the bench, a bowl of chips resting in the circle of his arms, and Minghao wonders if he can tell what is going on inside Minghao’s head. It would be easier than having to say it out loud, he thinks. Easier than admitting it. He takes another swig of the wine in his hands and lets himself lean into the small heat of the evening, the spark of Chan’s voice.

—

“You’re drunk.”

“I am not drunk.”

“You are.”

 _“I’m not!_ Could a drunk person do _this?_ ”

Minghao watches helplessly as Soonyoung pours half of his RTD down his shirt, before blankly looking down at it as if he’s not sure how that happened. In yet another display of Sooyoung's drunken idiocy, he turns with frankly impressive posture, stumbles over to where Jihoon is tapping at his phone, and drapes himself over him, to the loud, disgruntled protests of Jihoon.

It’s late, now; sun completely gone, with the smoke drifting through the screen door looks like it’s coming from the void, the backyard devoid of any kind of light. Everyone’s gotten progressively drunker at this point, the empty bottles lined up at the back door, and Minghao’s found himself pressed between Jeonghan and the pile of bags and jackets piled up on the couch cushions. From the kitchen, Seokmin belts out a pretty impressive Bohemian Rhapsody, and the rest of the group in the hallway chimes in with a less impressive, but equally as rowdy rendition.

Across the room, Chan laughs loudly as Seungkwan slides down to sit on the floor, and Minghao’s drunk enough that he doesn’t shrink back into the couch, just tips over onto Jeonghan’s shoulder to look at where he’s tapping around at the Neko Atsume screen. He’s presumably also drunk enough to ignore the screeching as Joshua attempts an operatic voice to the cheering of two of the girls and a face-down Wonwoo.

He spots Chan out of the corner of his eye a moment before he throws himself on top of Minghao, flopping down on top of him and Jeonghan, who simply shifts to accommodate the third body.

Minghao freezes for a moment, before relaxing into the contact - this is just what Chan does, the weight of him something familiar. It is not terrifying when Chan initiates it because then Minghao can reassure himself that it is not unwanted, and Minghao’s thoughts are loose enough to let it be. So Chan lies, flopped on top of him for a while to stare at Jeonghan’s screen, to make snide comments about the cats and decor in the house, before being shut up after a sharp flick to the forehead from Jeonghan. He giggles drunkenly at the reprimand and settles back down into Minghao’s lap where he’s flopped over sideways, feet stuffed under the jacket-bag pile. Face turned to watch where Jihoon has seemingly accepted his state of existence with Soonyoung draped over his legs and chattering at a million miles a second.

It’s nice to feel everything back to normal for a while, able to fool himself back into their steadfast friendship, nothing else lost - the heat of Chan against his chest a reminder of fourteen years of summers and non-summers.

At some point, the copious amounts of alcohol he’s drunk over the course of this evening make themselves known, and he pushes Chan off his legs to stand up for the bathroom. Chan makes a muttered protest from where he’s landed on the floor, but eventually he rolls over onto his back to give Minghao a grin and moves to latch onto Seungcheol’s leg.

There’s a line in the hallway for the bathroom, and Hayoung turns to give him a smile from the spot ahead of him and start chatting. She’s arguably the responsible one of them all, having stopped drinking at ten, and she ends up driving the conversation when it appears that Minghao is past any kind of intelligent conversation for the night. She chatters to him about the drama that he’s apparently missed happening in the back garden, and Minghao is able to make vaguely committal noises of agreement for her to laugh at.

“When do you leave for uni?” he eventually asks, figuring he can at least let her talk about herself for the amount of snacks she’s snuck to him under the desk this year in calculus.

“Who said anything about leaving?” Hayoung grins, and Minghao tilts his head in confusion. She laughs at that, pokes at him with her foot. “I’m staying here. Got picked up for an apprenticeship at the mechanic shop, so I’ll be here for a while longer.”

“The one down Well street?”

“Yea, the one with the big red tractor tire outside it,” she laughs. “I figured I don’t have anything to lose by doing it, so I’ll just be living at home to save some money. Gain some experience, y’know?”

The surety of her words sets his head spinning. Like Seungcheol, she’s not scared to stay. Not for the first time, Minghao wonders why.

“Guess you won’t be needing those differentiation methods, after all,” he manages to weakly joke, and she chokes out a sputtered laugh, before slipping into the bathroom with a grin when it opens. When the door locks behind her, Minghao stands for a moment wrapping his head around the logistics of staying here. Of not leaving when his time is here. He barely registers when Hayoung leaves, holding the door open for him, and he gives her a wry grin.

Inside the bathroom, Minghao doesn’t even bother moving, just leans against the wall and looks into the mirror on the wall, the edges dappled with smudges and dark spots from where the silver backing is separating from the glass. Minghao wonders what will happen when he leaves, Hayoung’s words having brought back an age-old question to himself.

The problem is he knows he's not staying, but what if home isn’t either? He needs to know there’ll be something to come back to, even if he hates it. This town as his backspace. His saved messages. Minghao stares blankly into the age-yellowed mirror, and in the moment before recognition seeps in, all he sees is confusion.

When Minghao exits the bathroom, the music’s been turned down and the pile of jackets is slowly depleting as the midnight curfew on most of them starts kicking into action. Soonyoung’s being dragged out the back door by Jihoon and Wonwoo, apparently to jump the fence and make their way over to the side of town sitting under the hill, and Seungcheol is picking up bottles from the floor, tossing them into a recycling bin in the corner.

“Hey, I’ll walk you home,” Minghao hears from behind him, and it’s the alcohol in his bloodstream that keeps him from jumping a foot in the air when Jeonghan speaks from out of nowhere.

“It’s fine, I’m not a kid anymore,” he responds, turning to where Jeonghan tosses him his jacket and bag; Minghao pats his pockets absentmindedly, and the bulge of his keys and phone are a reassuring feeling. “It’s like, midnight, no one’s on the streets this time of night.”

“Sure, but we haven’t talked much tonight and I want to. And while you are indeed an adult,” Jeonghan pauses to catch the keys thrown at him by Joshua, “you’re hammered and I feel responsible for your safety.”

Minghao gives a slow nod, agreeing if only to avoid the fallout that would come with denying Jeonghan anything. He slings his bag over his shoulder and forgoes his jacket - he stepped out into the garden earlier and it’s still sweltering even though it's the middle of the night. Even if there’s a windchill, the shock should sober him up a bit.

Jeonghan yells goodbye to the stragglers in the room still, everyone having disappeared in a few minutes with the music turned down and the lights turned on. Minghao doesn’t blame them - it’s a weird feeling to look around and finally see everyone in their details. The aftermath of a party has always seemed like a liminal space to him, the fallout and empty bottles a holding place for the next day.

Chan turns to wave a goodbye from where he’s still dancing to the quiet music with Jaehyun and Yewon, a yelled “See you tomorrow!” his parting gift for Minghao, alongside a raised middle finger from Jaehyun. Minghao laughs at that, lighter now that the heavy oppressiveness of the dark has been raised, everything a little more real now, and lifts a hand in farewell. Chan turns back to Yewon and Minghao’s heart pangs at the sight as Jeonghan tugs at his arm to lead him out the door. On the front steps of the house, the smashed glass glitters like stars, and Minghao barely avoids stumbling down them.

Even when they’ve walked down the street, the music hums in his chest, the thrum of the bass reaching through the concrete to where they’re stumbling past Ms Kim’s half destroyed green bin. The streetlights paint the footpath bronze, yellow, golden, like the sun has hidden itself under their feet to wait out the nighttime.

They wander down the street to where the music is indiscernible from the cries of the cicadas, still active at night, and Minghao finds himself kicking at the small rocks that find their places in the cracks in the footpath.

Beside him, Jeonghan is silent, despite his talk of wanting to ‘catch up’, and Minghao lets him exist in silence as they walk along. It’s nice at least; being able to be comfortable in the silence. Until, softly, Jeonghan asks, “So, um. Chan?”

Minghao stops in place halfway to kicking at another stone.

Jeonghan stills beside him, and Minghao barely registers him over the rushing of water in his ears, unsure of what to do now that he has nowhere to hide. The night is suddenly horrifically, uncomfortably quiet, and he is out in the open, too long silent to safely deny what Jeonghan has noticed.

“Minghao-” he hears from beside him, and he turns to throw up into the gutter.

Minghao’s known it for a long time now. Confronting it is a different story.

There is a difference between acknowledging something and having to admit it to yourself. One is passive. The other is active, and the activity of facing this fact and knowing that it will change something fundamental to his world has always been too frightening to Minghao to go through with. Minghao likes routine. He likes safety in the knowledge that nothing has changed.

But here, the choice has already been made for him, and when he wipes at his mouth with his wrist, he opens it at the same time and admits to the sticky tar of the road, “I’m gay.”

The world does not end. The concrete does not crack with the force of the words, and his heart does not implode. Here though, in the soft dirt of the roadside verge, it feels like the tiny fantasy world he’s constructed inside of him crumples with those two words, no longer something to hide behind.

At some point in the following silence, the little cracked thing inside Minghao’s chest cracks open and spills all over the pavement. It’s not that he’s upset. It's just that everything has caught up to him and he’s crouched over the gutter in tears with Jeonghan standing behind him.

He hates how the tears come unsummoned, a not-really sob but more a hard lump in his throat, too dry to swallow and too _there_ to ignore. Logically, he knows there is no reason for them. Illogically, he reconciles them as something painting this all as real, and happening; a train on the rail-lines with broken brakes. Minghao feels Jeonghan move beside him, and he’s still not quite aware of everything around him. He just knows the grass is damp with night where his trailing hands touch it, and his cheeks are hot with tears.

Minghao has learned to watch himself in third person. He has always been hyper aware of himself - wondering what others see when they look at him, what they _think._ Here, it is sickly satisfying to see Jeonghan crouch down beside him and do nothing but keep a hand on Minghao’s back as he cries into the gutter. He has not shied away from Minghao for one moment, and that is how Minghao knows he never will.

Behind them in the house, he knows Chan is still drunk on cheap shots and dancing around the living room, without a care in the world, no matter that the music has been stopped. Minghao wishes desperately for that moment in Seungcheol’s house to have been frozen, where he could stay forever and not fear anything changing, not feel guilty for wanting things to change.

The guilt is a friend as old as Minghao’s love for Chan, the desperate humiliation welling up inside of him like seawater pooling in his footprints in the sand. Minghao has always seen love portrayed as a helium high, caramelized hearts, whatever they show on TV - not this choking desperation when he's separated from Chan, the easiness of existence when they reunite.

Seokmin's terrible rom-coms cannot express how desperately Minghao wants for everything he cannot have. Cannot comprehend how guilty he feels for wanting more when he already has all of this - Chan lazing on his bed after school, aiming popcorn to toss into Minghao's mouth, Chan taking time to explain that one step Minghao always trips up on at dance practice, Chan at fifteen and looking back at Minghao underwater.

And he cannot feel this because one day he will be waving goodbye to him and Minghao will turn the key to start his beat up little car engine and he will not look back over his shoulder. He still wants to run away from this all. He does not want to leave, but Minghao cannot stay like this.

Even so.

“I love him,” Minghao admits into the gutter. When he looks up at Jeonghan, there is nothing resembling disgust or pity, and Mingho is unsure of what to do when he is not defending this fact. For a moment there is stillness, before Jeonghan reaches cautiously out to rub his back with a hand.

“Thanks for telling me,” Jeonghan starts, quietly. “Why were you scared? Did you think I would leave?”

Minghao nods, short and sharp, and Jeonghan breathes out slowly, putting more pressure into the meditative-like motions he’s rubbing into his shoulder blades through the thin cotton of Minghao’s shirt. “I won’t,” he says, slow, sure. “You’re my friend, Minghao. This is no different to that time you told me you cheated on that Economics exam.” The joke lands awkwardly in the air, and the silence settles longer this time. The cicadas have started up again, chirping in the blackness of the evening, and Minghao pulls in a rattling breath.

“I’m proud of you,” Jeonghan says, finally, and Minghao hiccups his way into another sob, the weight of the words hitting him like that time at dance Soonyoung tried to bodily throw Chan at Minghao for a routine.

Slowly, he calms himself down, staring dazedly at the pale skin of his hands. He was right not to wear his jacket - all the pressure in his head has him feeling like he’s been boiled alive like a frog in a pot.

“Well, that’s one way to get all the alcohol out of your system.” Jeonghan starts carefully, once the tears subside. “I wouldn’t recommend it, but it seemed effective,” and Minghao laughs wetly at the bad joke, tipping himself back to sit on his haunches and stare up at the blackness of the night.

Above him, his daydreams are hung from the streetlights, too high to reach, too high to escape into. Down below, here on the pavement, Minghao must face reality.

He wants to laugh at it, the ridiculousness of it all - how he’s spit out the truth and all he can think about is the little loss.jpg illustration on the side of his shoe that Jihoon drew in the middle of physics last year.

There is a lightness though, now. Admitting it to himself does not hurt as much now as it did in the moment, and when Jeonghan moves to help him up, there is the smallest hint of a smile tugging at the edges of Minghao’s mouth.

—

**_Step 6: don’t get your hopes up._ **

Minghao escapes from Art History at noon, peeling his arms off of the vinyl of the school desk and texting Chan the moment he breaks free of the stuffy air of the exam room. Beside him, Minju starts crying and as he picks up his bag from the dry grass outside the classroom he hears her sob “I don’t even know who Bill Hammond _is_ and they wanted an analysis of his trademark styles?”

“It’s okay,” Minghao watches Jeongguk tell her, hand on her shoulder. “If it makes you feel better this wasn’t even my exam. I was supposed to be in Geography and got the classroom wrong.”

In the midst of a hiccuping laugh from Minju, Chan replies with a ‘sure!’, with a smiley face and a wave emoji tacked on in a second message. With that, Minghao moves to climb the steps that led to the main road with a short wave to the rest of the group, still discussing exam answers.

Minghao's first car is a hunk of metal, blue peeling paint with upholstery to match. Despite the sticky clutch and the creaking springs in the passenger's seat, it's a little piece of freedom.

It's not long until he finds Chan opening the door and clambering into the passenger seat with his wetsuit bag in hand, having already strapped his board to the roof racks. "Turn the aircon on, it's _hot,_ " he whines, and Minghao just snorts, flipping the switch for the fan.

"Would you like a backrub with that too?" he gripes, and Chan's immediate 'yes please!' is enough to earn a soft whack on the shoulder.

"Lead the way hyung," Chan proclaims, feet propped up on the dashboard, and Minghao turns the keys.

The destination hasn’t changed, the allure of the wavebreak too strong to ignore in summer. With exams almost finished for the both of them, they’re free to escape into the depths of the familiar waters.

The break passes through the windows while they drive to the car park closest to it, empty at one pm on a Thursday. Tar sealed road gives way to sand, then gravel, then tarseal again, as the car drives over the raised lip where it was poured on top of the dirt. Minghao pulls into a park, no other cars around, and kills the engine with a sputter. The beach opens out in front of them through the windscreen, water glittering and blue as the waves peel off big and clean.

He goes barefoot on the pavement when he climbs out, the parking lot giving way to sharp gravel and broken bark that he has to sidestep. The calluses on his feet from years of this still reveal soft spots when faced with summer prickles in the grass, and the melted tar sticks to the soles of his feet.

Over the roof of the car he sees Chan clamber out too, turning to untie the straps lashing their surfboards to the soft racks Minghao keeps in his car. They end up dragging them to the verge of grass just off the beach to unzip the board bags and rub fresh wax over the stuff that they’ve yet to scrape off, layers and layers of sand filled wax chronicling the past.

Chan squats down to sit on his board without digging the fin into the dirt, running the block of wax over his board while Minghao unloads their wetsuits from the back seat and tugs at the towels from where they’re tangled around the seatbelts.

“How was your exam?” Chan asks, once Minghao has sat down beside him to wax his own board, taking it from Chan’s hand as Chan picks up the wax comb. The circular repetition as he rubs the block over the fibreglass is calming, and he relays the aftermath of the exam, Chan toppling off his board with laughter when Minghao tells him about Jeongguk going to the wrong classroom.

“Are you almost done?” Minghao asks, reaching to grab the wax comb from where Chan’s just set it down. “With your exams, I mean.”

“One to go,” Chan groans, standing up to shuffle into his wetsuit, winter suit and hood switched out for short sleeves and bare feet. “It’s tomorrow afternoon, but it’s the only one I’m actually confident about, so I should be fine.”

Minghao hums an assent, finishes curling the comb over the thick coat of wax he’s layered on in hopes that it’ll cover the sand that’s still encrusted in the old wax. Setting it to the side, he stands up to grab his own wetsuit; he strips his school shirt off to wriggle into the tight neoprene, still damp from the other day.

The wave conditions are near perfect; the sandbar out here causes a spill perfect for a long ride, and on days like this even the bigger waves over by the cliffs can’t beat it.

“I’ll beat you to the water,” he hears from above him, and can only watch as Chan shoots him a grin before taking the fuck off down to the shoreline. Minghao is caught still picking up his board, and he gets tangled up in the leash when he jumps up to make chase, pushing the muscles gained from years of dance as far as he can. The sand gives way under his bare feet as he sprints down the beach after Chan, who’s laughing loudly enough to scare all the seagulls away.

His board skims across the surface of the water, and he manages to paddle fast enough to cut ahead of Chan, turning into the shore just in time to claim the first wave for himself, pushing up from the board and balancing as the swell pushes him into the shore at speed.

The waves are just too big today to be comfortable, and Minghao relishes in it in some sick way. The pressure holds him under when he comes off his board as the whitewater settles, the churning and saltwater at the back of his throat.

He comes up grinning, Chan yelling from out the back of the break. The leash tugs at his ankles, his surfboard battling the waves as they buffer him and the board in turn. He reels it in with a hand, the sand crusted wax scratching at his skin when he rolls back onto it, and he feels. Chan grins from atop his own board, and Mingaho _feels._

On his paddle out to the back, he duck-dives under an incoming wave, and the pressure holds him down for a second too long before he pops back up, gasping for air, a familiar stress. Minghao knows that the ocean’s scary. He knows it can take. But sometimes it’s ten types of turquoise and sometimes sea foam sticks to your eyelashes, sometimes the sun hits your face even when you’re twenty feet under, and he has a hard time forgetting that it’s first and foremost a womb.

Chan shoots him a thumbs up from his board when Minghao pops up from under the break, his board floating listlessly as he waits for the next set. He paddles over to Minghao when he approaches, reaching out an arm to grab at Minghao’s board to pull them together.

He ends up grabbing at Minghao’s hand, tugging at it to bring their boards together, and Minghao looks down into the clear water beneath their boards rather than look at Chan so close up. Chan’s fingers shift until they’re arranged into four points of white heat along Minghao’s wrist, a thumb pressing into the pulse where his arm meets his palm. Minghao desperately hopes for two things. One he knows he cannot have; the other is that Chan cannot feel the rabbit-pulse under his skin, hopes that it can be blamed on the surf and the sun and the adrenaline of the wave he just caught.

Chan lets go, after a split second, hangs onto the edge of Minghao’s board instead as he twists to see the next set incoming.

“This one’s mine,” he grins, pushing off from Minghao to paddle into the wave, and Minghao watches him go.

They end up out there far longer than they expect, the heat starting to trail off and the break starting to clog with other surfers. Work’s finished for the day, and from out the back they can see people pulling into the carpark to catch a wave before going home for the night.

Chan manages to snag a wave back into the shore, but Minghao’s less lucky and ends up just paddling in. As he lugs his board up the beach he catches a glimpse of a few other students, and Chan waves to a couple of the girls from his class as they zip up each other's spring suits.

Clambering up the beach to where their stuff is still lying, Minghao slumps to sit down on the line where the grass meets the beach, feet dug under the soft white of the sand. It’s warm, and in the cooling of the afternoon he digs then further under, gripping the sand with his toes.

Minghao breathes in the clean sea-air and wonders if his lungs will fill with smog in Beijing.

Beside him, Chan bites into the muesli bar he’s uncovered from his school bag, his wetsuit stuck to his hips, the black neoprene a second skin over his legs. He has no idea that Minghao has been dreaming of him in the daytime since they were fifteen and Minghao looked across the dance floor to see Chan illuminated in blue and red from the stage lights. Or was it sixteen and underwater at the indoor pools on a school trip? Seventeen and Chan tilting Minghao’s head forwards as blood dripped out of his nose, one hand gentle on the back of his neck, the other holding half a pack of tissues to his nose?

Or maybe it’s that moment Minghao keeps coming back to, second year at the bottom of the swimming pool. Eyes open despite the chlorine and finding Chan staring back, unblinking, even as the sunlight streamed through the water and reflected off the tiles into their eyes.

He cannot remember when Chan stopped being an intruder in his dreams and took up permanent residence. He still can't decide which one he hates less.

Chan laughs, watching one of the surfers at the back wipe out, and just for a moment, the impending summer is too much, a feeling he never got rid of even on the side of the road with Jeonghan.

 _He doesn’t want you_ , Minghao has to remind himself. The reminder isn’t nearly as painful as it sounds - he’s grown used to it, the pinging in his head when he gets too close to other boys, forgetting that the real world is not so forgiving of his feelings as the one inside his head. Last week with Jeonghan was a weight off his chest, a relief enough for him to stand up straight, but even so, he cannot ignore the realities of the world around him. What he feels is so wide and nameless that it engulfs him.

Chan shoots him a sideways look when he gets too quiet, silently asking a question with his eyes when Minghao finally looks at him. It’s just how they are; each a little transparent in the eyes of the other, like sunlight at the bottom of the swimming pool.

“You good?” Chan asks, and Minghao could not be further from it.

“It’s fine. I'm just thinking about how I’m finally done with exams,” he lies, and Chan takes the bit, groaning as he flops back down. “Don’t remind me,” he sighs, and Minghao laughs too, looser now, less pressured, and lies down to join Chan on the grass.

He pushes away the desire to grab at Chan’s hand and the sticky summer light paints their outstretched limbs in shades of burnt gold.

—

**_Step 7: remember, you’re leaving soon._ **

The windchime by the door rings with easy dissonance when Minghao pushes inside with a shoulder, dumping his wetsuit bag by the door and Chan doing the same thing a step later.

They’d changed out of their wetsuits in the car, but Minghao’s hair is still dripping down his back, the collar of his shirt uncomfortably damp in the humid air of the early evening. The clatter of tools calls attention to Minghao’s mother at the back door, and Chan calls out to her when she turns to them with dirt covered hands.

“What’cha doing, Auntie?” Chan asks, and she holds up a newly potted strawberry plant with a grin and an explanation that Minghao misses when he bends down to untie his sneakers. Chan laughs above him, and when Minghao straightens up, Chan squeezes at the wet hair at the nape of Minghao’s neck, the salt water running down the bone of his wrist.

“Don’t get water on the carpet, alright?” she calls, turning back to potting the strawberry plants into new pots, clay painted in bright colours.

“We won’t,” he calls back, and is overwhelmingly grateful that she had not said anything the other night when he got home with red rimmed eyes and the smell of alcohol; had only passed him a glass of water and told him to go to bed. That she would be there in the morning for anything.

He has not told her anything yet, and that she is still quietly patient about the fact is something he thanks her for silently every time he sees her now. Minghao grabs at Chan’s sleeve once he’s toed his sandals off, and drags him upstairs to grab dry towels from the hot water cupboard.

The towels are dried stiff from years of salt and their old washing machine, but Chan throws one over Minghao’s head with little care before slipping into his bedroom off to the right. Minghao has no choice but to follow. Less of a choice and more of a constant pull.

The clean sheets scratch against the dried salt on his skin when he sits down, dry and itchy and grounding. Chan sits down beside him to peel off his damp socks, and Minghao fiddles with his phone to avoid doing something he’ll regret with Chan pressed against him on the edge of the bed. Warm skin. Wet hair. Salt and sand and the apple scented shampoo Chan’s used since they were kids. His eyes in half light. His sun striped skin.

The light spills over the floor as golden hour starts to kick in, and Minghao cannot take his eyes off it when it paints pale lines over Chan’s hands.

When the sunlight reaches the crack in Minghao’s floorboards, it means it's summer; end of the year. The light stretches a few centimetres away from the line in the worn wood and Chan comments “The year’s almost over.”

When Minghao looks up, Chan is staring at the same strip of sunlight, same crack in the floor. “Everyone’ll be leaving soon.” Minghao hums in affirmation, the sound vibrating through the room.

“And what about you?” Chan asks, standing to sift through the miscellaneous junk on Minghao’s desk with fidgety hands. “What are you doing?”

The lies are buried too deep in Minghao’s bones for him to have something else to say. “I don’t know yet.”

“Really,” Chan murmurs, voice too soft and too quiet to be safe. When he turns around, Chan has an acceptance letter to Tsinghua’s business school in one hand and Minghao’s fate in the other. “Then what is this?”

Minghao’s heart drops into his stomach, and his teeth glue themselves shut as Chan stares at him, calculating. Watches as Chan reads off the paper, loud into the fresh silence, “Dear Mr Xu Minghao. On behalf of Tsinghua University Department of International Admissions, I am pleased to inform you that you have been accepted into our Bachelor’s Program in International Business and Commerce.”

The words sit in the air between them, and Minghao makes the mistake of not saying anything. Chan takes a step forward, incredulous, before stepping back, away from Minghao, and the recoil from him pains Minghao in a way he didn’t know was possible.

“Are you not going to say anything? Scratch that, _were_ you going to say anything?”  
  
Minghao does not want to say yes. Even if it is the truth.  
  
“Were you just going to, what. Leave and never come back? Send me an email once your flight had left saying, ‘It was nice to know you for your entire life, seeya never?’” Chan eyes are blown out in confusion, anger; hurt. It’s all hurt, Minghao realises, and the guilt that he’s caused that is just as overwhelming as the guilt of feeling everything he does.

“Do I mean nothing to you? You didn’t _say_ anything. Why _wouldn’t you tell me_ ” he hisses, and Minghao clamps his eyes shut, almost cringing at the pitch in Chan’s voice. “Do you trust me so little? Does everything here mean nothing? _Why didn’t you tell me.”_

Minghao pushes up from the bed and makes for the door. At the very least he can escape from this moment and return to it at a later time, like a pause button on a boss fight. A fire escape down the side of a skyscraper. The door of his childhood bedroom, away from this.

“Stop running away!” Chan screams from behind him, and Minghao stops with his hand on the doorknob. Minghao turns around slowly, cautiously, and the expression on Chan’s face has gone from confused and upset to _pisssed_. “Stop trying to get away,” Chan hisses, low voice, and the only time Minghao’s heard him sound like this was second year, with Yeri on the ground and one of the senior girls snickering. Her laughter hadn’t lasted long.

Chan stares at him with laboured breaths, shocked, anger palpable in the air, and it feels like that night on the footpath again, trying to scream _don’t you see me? Don’t you know I don’t want to leave but I can’t stay like this?_

But Minghao’s teeth clamp themselves shut again and all he can do is watch as Chan rolls his eyes with a scoff and turns to the door.

“Forget it,” Chan mutters, the words dark and bitter in his mouth. “Just. Fuck you Minghao. Really.”

It is the first time he has called Minghao by his full name in the fourteen years they have known each other. In the same voice Chan has used to call him ‘Hao’ in multitudes, like a pebble on his tongue, he looks at him and calls him ‘Minghao’ like a stranger.

When the door slams shut behind Chan, it sounds like a finality.

—

**_Step 8:_ ** **_remember that you don’t get to stay here._ **

Beyond the floating petrol cans the lifeguards use for swim training and the dark line where the sand drips off into an abyss, the horizon shines with the sinking sun. The water shifts beneath him, hollow clanks as the waves slap at the fibreglass of his surfboard.

He’s sitting out on his board for the second time tonight, this part of the beach less crowded than where he and Chan had been a few hours ago. There’s no waves here, just the cool flatness of the evening sea, dimming with the sunset. Minghao puffs out a breath, and lies down on his board, back to the sandy wax and face staring up at the sky, the dimming orange fading to deep blue.

His hands trail down into the water, and the cooling temperature manages to shock him back into some sense of existence, like a gentler form of running into an electric fence. The board rocks as he slowly sits back up, legs straddling the rails, and he looks back into shore where the lifeguard flags have been packed up, yellow and red no longer waving. The beach is empty apart from someone sitting on the shore, and another person walking their dog along the path behind the trees.

Minghao breathes out a long sigh, and starts to paddle back into the shore. No waves to carry him in this time.

He doesn’t know what to do. He thinks about Chan, and the hurt on his face, and Minghao winces, even out here on the water. So maybe he suppressed his feelings for Chan for three and a half years and in the interim had his innocence removed from him like a bad lung in surgery. So what? Now everything inside him is all tangled up like the woolen jumpers his mother unravels every year to reknit into something new, strewn across the floor and picking up bits of sawdust, memories, the brittle leaves from the lady palm in the living room, dried out from years in this town by the ocean.

His thoughts keep drifting back to that letter in his hand, and Minghao doesn’t know if he wants a way out anymore. The fin of his board hits sand, and he rolls off, allowing himself a moment underwater to ignore everything above it.

When Minghao finally emerges from the water, board tucked under his arm, Seungcheol is waiting on the beach, feet tucked under the sand and towel laid over his legs to shelter from the sun, no matter that it’s already set.

“Sun safety is paramount,” he’d told them all, years ago when he was fifteen and newly qualified as a guard, voice full of fake pomp and circumstance. None of them had taken him seriously until what is now known as The Hell Summer that had left them all glowing red and radiating nuclear heat for weeks.

Even though they’ve learned their lessons, Seungcheol still reminds them, a gentle chiding, “Put on more sunblock. NO MINGYU DON’T DRAW A DICK ON VERNON’S BACK.”

Minghao drops his board on the sand, sits down beside it with no heed paid to the sand sticking to his wet skin. He’d paddled out without his wetsuit - thought had not been given to this session. He just needed to get in the water. Seungcheol leaves him to sit in silence, and Minghao has always appreciated that; as much as he loves Junhui, Soonyoung, Mingyu - they never shut up. The quiet is a welcome respite from the storm in his head, and he digs his feet into the sand, the coolness of the underneath a meditative texture. Seungcheol shifts beside him, the little plastic ball inside of his whistle rattling when it falls from where it’s caught in his collar, and Minghao forgets, sometimes, that there are reasons that people don’t leave this town.

“Why did you stay?” Minghao eventually asks, cutting the silence slowly.

“In town?”

Minghao nods his head, and Seungcheol hums, tugs the towel off his legs to throw around Minghao’s shoulders. He hadn’t realised the sea-breeze had picked up, the salt a familiar taste on his breath. Seungcheol’s still thinking, so Minghao looks back out at the horizon where the sun has disappeared; the sky a grainy blue as the light slowly disappears. Digs his hands into the damp sand underneath him and grimaces when he feels it under his fingernails.

“I guess I just didn’t have any major reason to leave, just yet,” Seungcheol eventually says, and Minghao looks over at him in confusion, at the vagueness. Seungcheol must catch the look on his face because he grins guiltily and tries to rectify. “Not specific enough?” he asks, and Minghao nods silently.

“Well, I don’t think I really wanted to leave in the first place. I have reasons to stay here, right? The job, and you guys; god knows what Soonyoung would do if I left him here to deal with himself.”  
  
“Probably get hit by a motorboat or some kids' bicycle,” Minghao mutters, and Seungcheol laughs at that, nodding in agreement.

“Right! And I mean, I’m not planning on going to uni anytime soon - I mean, I could always head out to the polytech, but right now I don’t see any reason to, if I’m happy doing this.” He gestures to the lifeguard hut behind them, points up the road to where the clubhouse sits, peeling blue and white paint over old weatherboards. “I guess, if I didn’t need to leave, I didn’t see why I should.”

Minghao hums, unnerved at the ease at which Seungcheol admits his own uncertainty. Minghao is not a stupid child. He is not even a child any longer, with a hesitant, then terrible certainty, that sometimes familiarity disappears beneath your feet. The recorder rhythm of primary school, the shredded innocence. Childhood dreams carved out of corn flakes and coriander. Even so, he still cannot admit it out loud, the fears.

“Why were you asking?” Seungcheol asks, finally, voice cutting out into the sea air. “For some reason I don’t think it was just for curiosity.”

Minghao stays quiet, stares out at the ocean, at the calm patches to the left of the rocks that note the building of a rip, the water cloudy with churned-up sand.

As a kid, Minghao would lie awake at night picturing the chilling quiet of a rip, forcing the image to burn into his brain. The lack of control; the gentle tugging away from everything you know, being washed out to sea. It’s the same here, the leaving home. It feels cruel. Something in him isn’t ready to let go of this town, everything here, so easily. To destroy what he’s carefully cultivated all these years.

“I don’t really know if I want to leave,” Minghao finally admits, and it is too much like his admission the other night to be comfortable. “I don’t actually know what I want to do yet,” and it feels like it brushes against glass when he spits it out.

“Why don’t you stay then?” Seungcheol asks, voice even, reasonable, and Minghao stills at the question, wracks his brain for a coherent sentence. “Surely you could get a job at the studio - god knows you’re experienced enough, and you’ve taught classes before.”

“You don’t need to know what you’re doing right now; maybe a year or so will give you the time to figure it out. The fact that you’re even thinking about not going is reason enough to consider staying.”

Minghao stays frozen, still in the concept of it. Seungcheol gives him a look, before finishing with a, “You should do what you really want. You don’t have to leave, no matter what weird idea you’ve gotten into your head.”

The light is finally gone, now, and the black is settling in, the air cooled now and settling solid around them. He could stay. He doesn’t have to leave. He doesn’t have to know everything now.

_He could stay._

Seungcheol must sense something wrong, so all he does is stand, brush the sand off himself. Offer a hand out to Minghao to pull him up and leave the yellow stripes of his towel hanging around Minghao’s neck.

“Just think about it,” he tells Minghao, halfway up the sand dunes to the road, and Minghao does not say that he already is.

—

**_Step 9: don’t tell him_ ** ~~**_you’re in love with him_ **~~

Junhui catches Minghao as he walks out of the classroom, two weeks after exams have wrapped up, with a hand tangled in the stiff cotton of his sleeve cuff and a tug to the side, out of the doorway.

“I heard Auntie say you declined your admission?” he says, more a statement of fact than a question, and Minghao nods. He isn’t sure how to explain it, so he just doesn’t say anything, lets the silence speak for itself. The rubber of his shoes sticks to the floor and he runs the edge of one through the crack between the floorboards as Junhui stares.

Junhui has always been able to tell. Chan may have wriggled his way into Minghao’s life via the playground swings and never left, but Junhui was the first to know him, and he has continued to know him. _Sometimes being known is not terrifying,_ he thinks, when Junhui looks at him again; _really_ looks at him, and his expression relaxes.

“Why?” Junhui eventually asks, after what feels like an eternity of silence but was actually just a few seconds that included Seokmin tripping over the door bracket. “I’m not against you or anything; just, why?”

And then it’s all pouring out. Everything he’s said to Seungcheol, everything he told to Jeonghan, everything he confessed to his mother the other night, crying at the chipped kitchen table like when he was a kid and doing math homework. _I didn’t want to leave because I love it here, I’m scared of the lack of familiarity. I don’t actually know what I want to do, oh also I’m in love with Chan, just thought I’d let you know._

Junhui nods at it all, the perfect image of poise, before saying “That makes sense.”  
  
“What?”

“I mean, it was kind of weird that you were going to study _business,_ ” Junhui says, and Minghao laughs at the harsh truthfulness of it, paired with the relief that Junhui has elected to ignore Minghao’s harried coming out as gay in the hallway of the social sciences block. He wonders if Junhui had already suspected. “What are you doing, then? If you’re not leaving?”

“I talked to Jina, and she said she'll take me on as a senior instructor next year, if I want.”

“God, your extended family is going to have a field day with that. Gets accepted to Tsinghua and turns it down to teach five year olds hip-hop in a local studio.”

“Just for the record, I’m taking the eleven year olds to start with,” Minghao notes, and Junhui giggles again before settling into a sharp, pointed silence as he thinks.

“You’re not just staying for Chan, right?” Junhui asks, and the severity of the tone snaps Minghao into a sense of calm. There’s a look of concern on Junhui’s face, and Minghao dreads it.

Even so, the surety when he nods is relieving - Junhui confronting it assuages his own fears of that face. Minghao had spent so long seeing those problems as part of the same narrative that he was terrified he had combined them in a way. It’s relieving when Junhui makes him say the truth and he’s able to be sure that it isn’t; that he is not throwing away anything because of some misguided sense of attachment to Chan and his feelings. He would stay here whether or not Chan was here.

Minghao has no way of lying to Junhui. He has been there for as long as Minghao can remember, and it is a blessing at times, a curse at others, and Minghao loves him for it. There are different types of love. Junhui and Mingyu and Jeonghan and all the others are encompassed by one kind, just as important as that reserved for Chan.

“What even happened, by the way?” Junhui asks. “You don’t need to tell me everything, but, like, why has this all come to the surface now?”

Minghao looks sidewards, eyes up the scuff marks where the soft brown of the hardwood floors meets the walls, avoiding eye contact. “I fucked up. Really, really bad.”

Junhui looks at him, quizzical, and Minghao tacks on, “I didn’t tell him about my admissions. I didn’t explain why I lied, either.”

“That’s fixable,” Junhui says, relieved. “I thought you were about to say you ran over their family cat or something,” and at that Minghao actually laughs, lightness afforded by the exhaustion of classes.

“It’ll be okay,” Junhui tells him, and their friendship is old and settled enough that Minghao knows that that is the truth without any sort of insecurity.

Down the end of the sun-stained hallway, Wonwoo calls for Junhui, something about talking to their lit teacher about grades. “Talk to him!” Junhui calls as he races down the hallways, shoelaces untied and skittering on the floors, and Minghao waves a goodbye, turns the other direction to head down the empty hallway towards the back field.

It must be his lucky day then, Minghao thinks, when he turns the corner and comes face to face with Chan, walking down the stairs.

Chan’s eyes widen when he sees Minghao and immediately turns away, heading back up the stairs, and Minghao calls out to him in a flash of panic, a desperate “Wait!”

Chan turns to Minghao like a blurry classroom daydream.

Minghao’s outstretched hands feel like a bruised apology - not enough and yet too much at the same time. Chan stares at them wordlessly and Minghao wonders if he is thinking about how best to hide a body.

What do you have to say to someone you’ve let go of, anyway? I know you like your coffee cold with no milk and three sugars, but I don’t know what you’re thinking right now. I know you spend ten minutes every morning on your skincare routine, but I don’t know how to salvage this. I know that your favourite jelly flavour is orange, but only the store-brand packet.

I know that I’m a coward.

The silence between them stretches long enough for Chan to break it, voice cold and leveled.

“You have a minute on the clock to say what you want,” Chan tells him, unimpressed, and it’s such a _Chan_ thing to say that if they weren’t in this situation Minghao would laugh at it. Now, though, Chan’s voice terrifies him. It never has, but now, through the bruised-hip quiet of the hallway and Minghao’s own salt-preserved sentimentality, it sings out to that scared kid still inside of him.

On the blacktop, along the track, against the peeling varnish of the gym floorboards, somewhere, Chan once told him, “what have you got to lose?”

It had been cold that day, Minghao remembers, the two of them bundled up in scarves that were the school colours but not the official ones sold at the uniform shop - similar enough to get away with wearing in class, but not enough to empty their pockets for the simple addition of an embroidered crest.

“A B grade average,” Minghao had answered, gaining a slap on the arm and a huff of breath, pluming white in the cold air of winter. Between them sat Minghao’s drafted resignation letter, his part time hours at the local cafe too long to handle with classes and dance.

“I’m being serious,” Chan had whined, “you’re not happy putting up with this, right? So just do it! Tell them what you really think!”

Minghao looks up at Chan, standing above him on the stairs, and wonders what he has to lose by saying this.

“I’m not leaving,” Minghao tells Chan, and it is the first time he has said it out loud in the two years he has been struggling with that fact. “Not yet anyway."

“I declined my admission,” Minghao says, finally. “I’m staying here.”

Chan’s expression doesn’t change, and Minghao’s heart drops as Chan says, “If this is some awful idea of a joke or an apology, I don’t want it. I don't want you throwing away your future just to get me to forgive you for lying,” He says it coldly, frost-bitten words, and when Minghao is silent in the face of the words, Chan must take that as a concession, turning to walk again.

Silence has lost him too much already, Minghao decides. “I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark,” he blurts out, finally apologising straight out without stalling, shifting on his feet as the floorboards creak beneath him, and Chan turns back to him for the second time today.

“I really don’t want to leave because I still don’t know what I want - I mean, business? I failed level one economics. You still have to double check my taxes! But,” Minghao stalls, before saying, “I didn't want to do that to you either way. You're the last person I want to lie to.”

He looks up to where Chan has his hands knotted in the front of his shirt, a nervous habit. The button stitching is loose there, Minghao knows, from too many years of fiddling with them, Chan bunching up the fabric in his fists. He barely notices when Chan opens his mouth to speak.

“You’ve been lying to me for a lot longer than this, though.”

Minghao freezes at that, meets Chan’s eyes for the first time without either of them looking away.

“Yea,” Minghao admits, and Chan’s expression slips away from the frost.

The tension sits between them, like a rubber band about to be snapped, like the colourful hair ties Chan bought Minghao when his hair got too long for dance practice, little sea creatures attached onto them in the form of plastic charms. Doesn't matter what metaphor he uses; it’s all at the breaking point.

“You have to say it out loud.” Chan says. “That’s all I need.” They can communicate unsaid but Chan has always needed people to promise things in a tangible way. Has always needed promises spelled out for him.

Minghao takes a breath and admits it, the truth spilling out like saltwater.

 _“_ I’m in love with you,” is lost in the static in his ears.

It only takes a second before Chan is racing down the stairs, and Minghao is dimly aware of Chan's untied shoelaces pinging on the peeling wood varnish as he sprints towards him.

 _Please don't hate me,_ he thinks, exhausted, before Chan throws himself into Minghao’s arms.

Minghao stumbles back to balance the two of them and thanks the heavens that the hallway is empty or it would have acted as a human version of bowling pins. Chan’s face ends up pressed into the juncture of his neck, and Minghao finds himself with a mouthful of Chan’s hair as he blinks dumbly down at the situation.

“I thought I was the _only one_ ,” he hears Chan choke from his shoulder. “I was _really really hoping I was wrong._ ”

With all the eloquence of a primary schooler, Minghao hears himself say, “What the fuck.”

There’s a smothered cracking up from Chan, hot puffs of air on Minghao’s neck as Chan laughs at him, no matter that it’s resulting from Minghao’s absolute lack of ability to understand what’s going on right now.

Still pressed into his shoulder, Minghao hears, muffled, but strong -

“I really, really like you too. I don’t know if it’s love yet, but it’s definitely close.”

And _oh._ That’s what it was.

When Minghao finds himself still quiet, in shock, Chan looks up to say, “You're my best friend. It wasn’t going to be anyone else but you.”

When Minghao was eight, he got caught in the undertow at the beach, and was curled up underwater for three minutes before his father realised and dove under to pull him to the surface. In that moment, he understood what it was to be grateful for air; the desperate safety of breathing when he reached the surface.

It feels like that now. The breathlessness. The confusion. And then finally, finally, when Chan meets his eyes - air. Minghao finds himself looking down at Chan from where he’s in his arms, as Chan quietly asks, as if he’s embarrassed to; “Can I kiss you?”

“Yes,” Minghao says. He says it like a full sentence. The air is humid and Chan’s breath is malleable when he leans closer.  
  
There is no one there to witness it, just the two of them and the gilded sunlight through the windows as Chan leans in, lips soft and tasting of the sugary lip-balm he always uses. Keeps Minghao pressed there until the hallways are soft with silence.

Chan finally pulls back from a breathless Minghao, looks him dead in the eyes, and tells him, “That was kind of weird.”

It’s such a _Chan_ thing to say, that all Minghao can do is start laughing, and laughing, and he’s so exhausted from all of this that he doesn’t stop until Chan has started up on it too, choked laughs coming from beside him. And it’s just so ridiculous; to be losing his mind in the hallway in his last week of classes, laughing so hard after kissing Chan that he can barely stand upright, and Chan is laughing alongside him, a familiar territory.

It’s comforting. The familiarity; even with the reciprocation new to him, the laughter and Chan leaning on him for support is the same as always. Not everything has to change.

When the fit of laughter has finally subsided, Minghao looks down at Chan and asks “Good weird, or bad weird?”  
  
Chan looks up at him, grins. Bares his teeth to Minghao and says “Good weird.”

The sun slinks out from the walls and paints the floors golden. The bell rings from the other side of the classroom block. Minghao grins back, leans in again and meets Chan halfway.

—

**_Step 10: remember. it’s just Chan._ **

Minghao cries on his last day of classes, when the party poppers go and the third years sing the school song at the top of their lungs. The hall floors are wobbly beneath his feet and his eyes are blurry and he’s crying. He’s not leaving this place, but it’s knowing that all of this is gone and done; the routine and classes, lunchtimes spent doing absolutely nothing. Kicking off your shoes in the library and trying to creak the floorboards that you can hear in the classrooms underneath. Lying in the science block hallway in the sun and squinting at flashcards and your phone screen.

So he cries, and then laughs when Soonyoung throws a handful of confetti at Minghao that he’s been keeping in his pocket all day. And he lets it all go, with paper streamers in his hair and a wet grin.

Around him, everyone else is in similar states of emotional disarray, and Minghao spots Chan across the busy crowd of second years leaving the school hall. He knows he’ll see him later, no doubt in that knowledge, and lets himself be dragged away by Junhui for photos with his form class.

Everyone is heading in opposite directions, but right now everything’s okay. They’ll all be fine.

—

Seungcheol’s house is choked full of students when Minghao makes his way through the door, Chan and Mingyu a few steps behind him, and he almost trips when he tries to get his sandals off. He drops them into the pile on the front steps, and Chan reaches forward to re-tangle his fingers with Minghao’s as they wade into the house with the music pumping.

Minghao squeezes into the grip, as if to remind himself of the reality, and Chan gives him a smile, before tugging him faster towards the clumps of people dotting the front rooms. Chan shakes his hand free from the grip as they enter the living room, pressing dry lips to Minghao’s cheek with a grin and skipping off to where Jaehyun is already drunk and dancing beside the stereo. Minghao smiles, watching him go, before weaving through others to find food.

He’s sidetracked when Junhui tackles him from behind, cheering about finishing school as if he didn’t already do it that afternoon. Minghao can only give him a pained greeting, and a startled laugh when Junhui digs his fingers into Minghao’s side. He drags Minghao into the spare bedroom where Seungkwan is pulling cans out of the mini fridge and Jeonghan is lazing on the window sill with one leg outside the house. Vernon is standing outside, leaning on the small spot of ledge not taken up by Jeonghan’s legs, and the two of them raise a hand in greeting, Jeonghan giving Minghao a small, secret smile that he returns.

He leans into the throat of summer, chases it with the chill of the beer can that Seungkwan presses to his cheek with a grin and a comment about having to put up with them for another year.

The sun's going down on the shortest night of the year; tomorrow is the start of summer. Chan is glowing and golden and beautiful, and then there's Minghao; he used to forget that a world existed outside of them, and it's so easy to forget again. They're surrounded by people but it still feels unreal; Soonyoung yells somewhere outside, Seungcheol still cooking burgers in the kitchen.

Minghao knows the truth. This, all of this, is more real than anything.

Later in the evening, when the heat has dipped and the sun has dulled, he slips out the back door for a moment of air that isn’t punctuated by a yell or a puff of acidic smoke from Seungcheol’s broken stove, settling down on the back steps. Over the fence, past the road and the sand dunes, a slash of blue crosses the horizon, the ocean just visible from where he sits. He knows that if he jumps the fence, crosses the road in his bare feet, and slips down the dunes, that the ocean will be waiting for him. But he is comfortable here, for the moment, letting his gaze settle down to the backyard where he sits now, fixing his gaze on the dry earth, baked from the weeks of heat.

In the dirt beneath his feet he knows there is a half-rusted hole-puncher, packed under years and years. The grass has grown over it now. There is no returning to primary, with their colourful stationary and multiplication. He’s glad. It is good to know the people around him as they are now. Grown and more of themselves than they were as children.

Behind him, at the front of the house, there’s the sound of shattering glass, and a wave of laughter flows through the rooms. The bustle of people drowns out the bass from the portable speaker, playing a song of two summers past, and he hums along even as the noise grows.

Minghao is eighteen, sitting on Seungcheol’s back steps, when he realises that loving is not about being loved back.

It's in Seokmin and Joshua fighting over the shitty karaoke machine they all pitched in for in junior high, it's Jeonghan holding his hair back from his forehead when he cried into the street, it's Junhui whispering Mandarin on summer nights and laughing at his own jokes.

Even so, it is nice to be loved. There is a safety in knowing people care for you in return for your own love. Junhui laughs, somewhere inside, and the thing inside of him that has been slipping all year finally finds it’s footing.

Chan eventually finds him standing outside, slipping out the backdoor and joining Minghao on the steps. Behind him, in the kitchen, Minghao knows everyone is drunk and dancing and buoyant for the while.

“Why are you out here alone?” Chan laughs, reaching for his hand to tug at it. “C’mon, let’s go back in.”

Inside, there is the sound of broken glass being poured without regret into a bin, and a faint laugh. Chan’s grip is gentle, tangling their fingers, and Minghao lets himself be tugged at, willingly pliant.

In his pocket is a list, soft and torn from going through the washer too many times. He drops it in the recycling bin on the way into the kitchen, and steps through to where Chan is waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> \- the defence against the dark arts french position is a real thing at my school. those poor students have not had the same teacher for longer than a year  
> \- growing up sucks. i hope you get to choose happiness wherever you can. it's okay if you don't know what you want. let yourself figure it out at your own pace.  
> \- tomorrow morning i am going to go and throw myself into the ocean in my uniform, and i am going to be happy about myself. i hope you get to feel that way sometime soon.  
> \- i am on twitter as [@animediiac](https://twitter.com/animediiac), come say hello - i don't bite.


End file.
